Jesus & Economic Life (12) Village Restoration

The people of Israel were looking for a Messiah who would deliver them from the Romans. Jesus approach was different. He planned to renew economic life from the ground up. Most people still lived in villages. By applying the instructions for economic life, they could strengthen their communities.

God had given Israel an economic and social model for life together, but under the pressure of economic hardship, the people had stopped caring for each other. Most were so busy struggling to survive that they had no time to think about the situation of others. Caring and sharing had stopped and everyone was looking out for themselves. Cheating and stealing to get ahead were normal. People assumed that they had no other choice. Jesus challenged this view. He wanted the people to see that they would be better off if they adopted God’s way of living.

Jesus spent a lot of time in the villages of Galilee, challenging the people to restore the old way of life, as prescribed in the Torah. When he sent his apostles out on a mission, he told them to go to a village and stay with a person of peace. The aim was not just to get converts, but to restore village communities to God’s model for economic life. They were to focus on the person of influence or the person of peace, because this person would be essential for changing the way that people lived. The villages were a great place to re-learn giving and sharing. Jesus knew that the gospel and the instructions for economic life could restore the economic strength of village life and the Romans could not prevent this from happening.

The Kingdom will be like yeast spreading through the dough.

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough (Matt 13:31-33).

Applying this to Israel where Jesus was speaking, the parable says that the Kingdom of God will be established as the gospel and the Spirit spread from village to village and economic life was restored.

Jesus warned about a different type of yeast.

Be careful. Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matt 16:6).

The Pharisees and the Sadducees ignored the instructions for economic life, but they collaborated with the Romans to protect their position and privilege. Jesus later warned that those who had collaborated with the Romans would be destroyed. The collaboration system would eventually be swept away (Matt 24.) When that happened, economic strength could shift to the villages, if they had prepared by applying the instructions for economic life that God had given to them.